My Views on the News

December 30, 2022

Former President Trump’s taxes from 2015 through 2020 have now been publicly released and for all practical purposes have almost driven all other news off the airwaves. So what have we learned? He and his wife paid $750 or less in 2016 and 2017 and $0 in 2020 claiming a $5.5M refund that year. He did pay substantial amounts in other years but less on a percentage of income basis than the average taxpayer. In other findings, he listed interest income from each of his three children, his core business lost millions of dollars year after year giving the lie to his claims of being a great businessman. More importantly he listed significant income in the millions of dollars from countries he dealt with as president. For example he showed no income from China in 2015 and over $6.5M in 2017 after a state visit that year. He also showed $5.7M in income from India that year. There will be a lot more information coming forth as financial reporters peruse the returns over the next several days.

But the lies he told about being audited when he wasn’t were egregious. Plus there was no reason why his taxes couldn’t be released even if he HAD been being audited. He also lied about his bank account in China.

Yesterday, President Biden signed the $1.7T omnibus spending bill to fund the government through the balance of this fiscal year. Whereupon Trump raised his head, called it stupid, called Mitch McConnell weak, and true to his classy self threw a racist slur he’s used before on McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao

As Iran sends drones to Russia to be used to destroy Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, Erdogan’s Turkey arranged to send surplus Turkish Air airliners to Iran. NATO needs to look into Turkey’s reliability as an ally as Russia doubles down on its criminal attacks on Ukraine. I have personal experience with Turkey’s unreliability as a NATO ally going back to August of 1964 when Turkey took their U.S. paid for NATO F-100s and shot the hell out of the Greeks on Cyprus.

Southwest Airlines, along with Elon Musk and George Santos (written about yesterday) has a lot of explaining to do. Hopefully under oath — all of them.

Barbara Walters has taken her final bow. She WILL be remembered.

I have but one — maybe two — thing(s) to say about immigration. First is that our immigration laws are sadly out of date and it is past time to address it. And second . . .